Vodkatron's Wildin' Country of the Week: The Republic of Serbia

As I was buying my daily pack of parliaments today, I happened to glance at the Daily News. On the front page was a story about a Serbian basketball player at Binghamton University who was involved in the senseless beating of an honor student from Brooklyn. The story is pretty fucked up, and I don't want to get into it. What I found more striking, is how the Serbian government posted his $100,000 bail, gave him an emergency passport and put him on a flight to Europe within two days of his arrest. That's a wild move. Then I started thinking about Serbia's history, and I realized that it is chock full of wildin' ...

Let me post a disclaimer before going any further. The comments I am about to make are not intended to perpetuate any sort of stereotypes or generalizations about the wildin' status of the Serbian People. I only know five Serbians; my good friend Milosh, his brother, his mother, his father and his aunt. While they are slightly more prone to wildin' than most, they are generally swell folks...except that Losh's dad hates me because I wore an Old-English hat at graduation. All that being said, Serbia has always been a little Balkan powder keg.

Serbian breakfast consists of a spoonful of honey and a shot of homemade brandy (which I hear tastes like hydrogen peroxide). They say it is to rid their stomachs of bacteria, but I think its just a good-ole-wildin' way to start the day. But lets go back to the metaphorical breakfast of Serbian existence. In 1389, the leader of Serbian resistance to the Ottomans, Milosh Obilich, was summoned to kiss the foot of the Ottoman Sultan to prove his allegiance to the empire. He agreed, but when he knelt down in front of the sultan's feet he unsheathed his knife and stabbed the sultan in the stomach and proceeded to rip upwards through his ribcage into his adam's apple. Oblicich was than beheaded, but the legacy of his thuggery remains today.

Fast forward a few centuries. In 1914, a Serbian nationalist is widely said to have assassinated Duke Franz Ferdinand, therein starting WWI. Nice one. After WWII, Serbia was assimilated into Yugoslavia under non-aligned-Croat-commie-pit bull Josip TITO (the CIA World Factbook capitalizes all the letters in his last name. Is it an acronym or is he just that dude?). Now, there is a lot to be said for communist repression being wild in its own right, but the Serbs, as an ethnicity, were kept on lock. But in 1989, the infamous Slobodan Milosevic changed all that, taking wildin' to a whole new, and much less laugh-at-able, level when he allocated all power to the Serbs and started on a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing. Not really that funny. According to my good friend Milosh, most Serbs do not like 'Slobo', but some still do.

So NATO bombed the shit out of Belgrade, the UN took control of the Kosovo region of Serbia (which is majority ethnic Albanian, and was the eye of Milosevic's genocide storm), and the Balkans cooled off a bit. Serbia has been doing a bit better ever since. By a bit better I mean its not involved in any large scale conflicts, but lets just look at how these boys are still wildin'.
2001: Belgrade has it's first, and last, gay pride parade. My good friend Milosh is not homophobic, which leads me to believe that not all Serbs are homophobic... but these ones sure are!

The person who posted this pretty disturbing video forbade embedding, so click here to watch.

-2003: The Serbian Mafia assassinates Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, probably for having to many consonants in his last name.
-2006: Slobodan dies in Den Hague. I am sure a few people were sad...scores of republicans came out of the woodwork to mourn when Reagan died, and he was a huuuuge dooschbag.
-2007: During a basketball game between the Serbian Red Stars and the Greek National team a brawl, turned riot, turned fire works display broke out between the Serb fans and the Greek ones. Guess who started it? I actually don't know the answer, but lets just assume.
-2008: In February, Kosovo was granted independence from Serbia after being under UN governance for 10 years. Serbs were pissed. I have no fucking clue why. There are 100,000 Serbs there, and ten times as many Albanians. The land is not tillable, Prishtina is an armpit. Kosovo's main export is crushed metal, and their main trade partner is the mighty nation of Albania. Either way, a mob of especially rowdy Serbs responded by trashing the Croation and US embassies. Whatever, we have never gotten along especially well anyway.

Finally, in the wilder spirit of one-up-edness, an eight year old Serbian boy who goes only by the initials VP (kind of a OG move), stole a car, much like Latarian Milton. Unlike Latarian (who btw is the most adorable little blob of thuggedness I have ever seen), however, VP kept it really real and actually ran over somebody.

In summation, The Republic of Serbia is sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, and generally ridiculous. Their administration is way too bullheaded to get into the EU, the mob runs mad sects of the economy, and people are generally happy; embedded in a tradition of wildin' which, whether you like it or not, as a wilder, you must salute. Do it the Serbian way- by shooting guns, getting stumble drunk, and proclaiming your ethnic superiority in song.